TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK: I grew up in a very religious family.
There were several ministers in my family.
You know, it was a sense of community.
It was um filled with beautiful stories and great music.
And those stories are things that you can just kind of
take along in your pocket and take out whenever you need them.
I thought I wanted to be a comic book artist,
but over time I became interested in different kinds of art.
But I never lost that love for that kind of storytelling, you know,
this idea of superheroes and this panel by panel narrative.
I like to pick language that has a certain kind of a cadence
and I like to pick words that have double meanings.
Or, if you take a letter away it’ll be maybe even an opposite word.
Sometimes words explode and its just about each individual letter.
TDH: Mounds are these half human, half plant mutants
that came to life about 50,000 years ago
when an ape man masturbated in a field of flowers.
His human parts are co-mingling with the plant parts and, like,
it’s starting to bubble and boil and something’s about to sprout out of this mess,
and that’s the Mound.
The story comes to me as visions.
After I realized what Mounds were,
I had a lot of questions for myself.
So, where do they come from?
How tall are they?
Do they eat?
Like, just all of these types of things.
And in asking the question, you can then almost have like an epiphany
and from there you just keep going and it actually snowballs.
And to me, that’s what the vision is all about.
This painting here is called “By and By”
and this is the last in a series of paintings
that are about the life and death of Mound number one
and his name is The Legend.
And the skeleton of Mound Number One has been left in the forest,
and all of the forest animals and even some animals that are not from the forest
have come to grieve and to pay their respects.
I’ve always like the story of Noah’s Ark
and the idea of all of these animals that
put their differences aside to coexist in this one space.
And that’s kind of what’s happening here.
All the animals from around the world have gathered together
to pay homage to this great creature.
When you see black and white or words within paintings, it’s Loid.
And Loid is kind of a father type of an energy.
And he’s also all about kind of black and white.
There’s no in between.
Painter is a spirit energy who is kind of a mothering type of an energy.
Anytime you see colors within the paintings,
that’s as a result of Painter’s presence.
A lot of it comes back to my mother.
She is Painter and she is Loid wrapped up into one.
You know, she is the smiling face of Painter, she is the color that you get from Painter.
But at the same time she was stern when she spoke her word
you had to listen, so she was also Loid.
Mom: A lot of his art, I think, is what he has seen over the years,
over his childhood --
some of the hurtful things, I think.
And then he wanted to get in there and do something about it.
And I think he has created someone to do that,
and that has become his Torpedo person.
Torpedo Boy is kind of my alter ego.
And I created him when I was, I would say, in the fourth grade.
He can fly, he can lift things.
He’s a super hero.
And he’s super strong, except he has an inflated ego.
Mom: I think eventually he will really find out
who can actually solve it all
and that goes right back to his roots and the Bible.
TDH: Painter and Loid, you know, with their son Torpedo Boy,
is a lot like the Holy Trinity.
God sent his son down to save the Earth.
Torpedo Boy is sent to like protect these Mound creatures
and to do good things. But Torpedo Boy is terribly flawed.
And his pride and all of his other human emotions
get in the way of him performing his duties.
He looks like me.
He is me.
I even have a Torpedo Boy outfit that I wear while I’m painting.
In the show ‘It Came from the Studio Floor,’
Torpedo Boy is the protagonist.
And we are taken step by step through where he was
when Mound Number One was attacked and killed.
So, we get to see what, you know,
what was the hold up,
why didn’t he make it in time to save Mound Number One?
In a way the scale of the show is kind of heroic.
Like, there’s a giant Torpedo Boy “T” painted on the wall.
But, he arose and fell all in the same show.
(laughs) It’s pretty pathetic.
I tend to have an entourage with me wherever I go –
not necessarily people, but objects.
I have a collection of grocery lists,
plastic tops, amateur paintings,
photos I find on the ground.
Balloons – you can never have too many balloons.
This belonged to my grandfather, who was a butcher,
and I guess he used this to shield himself from offal
and various meat juices.
I don’t know, I just like to have echoes of my family around
and then they echo into the work.
Even here at home, I like to have things out all the time.
I’m a big toy collector and I’ve been actively trying to
piece together my childhood by finding all of those toys.
It’s just an effort to reconnect with a time
when I was just a little more open and receptive to things.
And its just great to have these things around me as a reminder.
It’s almost a dangerous obsession,
like I have to get all of the toys since some of my toys were taken away,
I have to now get all of them back.
I had one when I was a kid, but it got thrown away.
Monica: Some people put things in files or folders or stacks,
but he doesn’t stack, he piles.
TDH: I’m getting better about filing things because of her,
because she’s organized, she can do that.
It’s hard.
Anywhere I move, these mounds seem to move with me.
It's like, in my car there’s a pile of things that’s a mound.
In my studio, there’s piles of things all over the place
and that’s how I pick from these piles.
What’s happening with the pieces that are in the studio,
I see those as colorful blasts of energy or communication from Mounds,
these visions of hope.
So in a way it’s like God’s promise with the rainbow after the flood.
In my work, I feel I’m finally being able to bring together
the worlds of comic book narratives and the history of abstraction.